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Laptops could use a little sexy back. For the past few years, tech companies have been focused on tablets and smartphones, and in the meantime, a simple clamshell laptop has been relegated to workhorse status. You use it to type blog posts on planes, not to glimpse a vision of the future. Apple’s Macbook is a curiosity in a company now defined by the iPad and iPhone. But today Google unveiled the Chromebook Pixel, a premium, touch-screen laptop that’s betting we’re not in the post-PC era yet.

Google’s previous Chromebooks were budget devices aimed at people looking for a second computer. The Pixel is different -- it's aimed squarely at the Macbook Air. It’s a premium product designed to be a status symbol akin to an Apple product. It has a high-resolution touchscreen with a total of 4.2 million pixels that Wired calls “gorgeous.” It’s priced at $1,300 for a standard, 32G version and $1,450 for a Verizon LTE-enabled version with 62G.

It runs Chrome OS and it's built for the cloud – hence the small hard-drives. That might make some users uncomfortable, but I think it’s a decent bet to bank on what is bound to be the near-future of personal computing in all its forms. In addition, the Chrome OS doesn’t have the sort of software long-established Windows and Mac operating systems boast – that’s a problem for professionals and personal users alike.

But it is cool. This machine has its own style. At least in a world where everything is a slight variation on the flattish silver box. It doesn’t look like an Apple product. It’s harder and more industrial. To me, this style embraces the idea of a laptop as a work machine. It certainly is arresting, in that same way brand-new Apple products sometimes are.

I’m not sure this product will jump out of its box. There are too many unknowns, from the pure reliance on cloud and the lack of software to the new OS and the pricing that beats out even Apple. The notion of having 3 Microphones is...stupid. It doesn’t feel justified yet, as Darrel Ethrington writes at Tech Crunch:

“For a machine aiming at power users, it’s a device surprisingly devoid of power features. ChromeOS is, for all its strengths, still essentially a browser, after all. This thing can’t run Photoshop, which you’d be able to do no problem if you spend $100 less and get a 13-inch MacBook Air. It can play back movies on that gorgeous screen, but not in as many file formats or with as much ease as you could manage with a Lenovo Yoga 13, also cheaper at $1,049.”

It’s still exciting. This isn't always a purely logical market -- witness the power of "the Apple tax." This feels like it could be anything-but-cautious beginning of serious Google computers. Between the sci-fi future of Project Glass and this intriguing new Pixel, I find myself getting more and more excited about Google hardware.